Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday January 24, 2014 @10:56AM
from the everything's-inevitable dept.

New submitter SpankiMonki writes "Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine has written an article about how Jeremy England, a MIT professor, may have found a theory of the origin of life grounded in physics. In a paper published last August by The Journal of Chemical Physics, England describes his theory, the 'Statistical physics of self-replication.' Wolchover writes, 'England['s]...formula...indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.' England says his ideas pose no threat to Darwinian evolution: 'On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.'"

For those too lazy to RTFA and comment section,Karo Michaelian says:January 22, 2014 at 3:52 pm

The theory for the origin and evolution of life as presented above and accredited to Jeremy England is not new. It was published by myself in 2009, K. Michaelian, arXiv:0907.0042 [physics.gen-ph] http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0042 [arxiv.org] and again in 2011, K. Michaelian Earth Syst. Dynam., 2, 37-51, 2011 http://www.earth-syst-dynam.ne... [earth-syst-dynam.net] The observation that under a generalized chemical potential material self-organizes into systems which augment the dissipation of that potential should be accredited to Ilya Prigogine, “Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes”, John Wiley Sons Inc., 1968. I have written a number of other papers on the thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life, including an explanation of homochirality. These papers are freely available by searching for my name “Karo Michaelian” on ResearchGate. I welcome Jeremy’s contribution to the effort to understand life from a thermodynamic perspective.

No kidding - I had this idea 30+ years ago in grad school while waiting to fall asleep for the night. Fantastic idea and I knew on the spot it to be true that the second law of thermodynamics *drives* evolution. Figured it wasn't new, but was still happy that I thought of it, and next day checked the library - yep it wasn't a new idea even 30 years ago...

Entropy is the log of the number of available states. If you start with large N atoms, you have a huge, but calculable entropy. If you now let the atoms form molecules, the entropy of the system goes up, even though a molecule is more complex than single atoms. The energy from the sun provides heat that moves stuff around and close enough for bonding (and sometimes splitting those bonds). Eventually, you fill up the statistical distribution of allowed states (chem compounds, complex organic molecules, e

"But now evidence has been offered that Dr. Ortiz and his group did access the observing logs. Prompted by questions by Dr. Rabinowitz of Yale, one of Dr. Brown's team members, Dr. Pogge, who maintains the Smarts telescope Web site, decided to investigate the traffic on the site. He found that compu

Thermodynamics does not apply to the micro scale, only macro scale. Given a system that is a subset of a larger system, that smaller system may reduce entropy, as long as the total entropy of the entire system increases. The most efficient way to get rid of excess energy is to reduce entropy in part of the system. When worded a slight different way, the fastest way to increase entropy in a system is to reduce entropy in select parts of that system.

Physicists sometimes have it easy. This kind of thing is akin that old joke about treating a cow like a sphere [wikipedia.org].Look with the chemical origin of life, that it was governed by physics [stanford.edu] is not in debate.What matters are the details, what came first; RNA world, [wikipedia.org] life on a metallic surface, [wikipedia.org] or some thing else? [acs.org]I have this to toss at so-called astrobiologists who claim that life is spontaneous and easy.If it is so easy why is there only one kind of life -- 20 amino acids, 4 DNA/RNA bases? To a bio organic chemist the "selection" of this chemical code is arbitrary. [scripps.edu] Why do we not live in an ecosystem with a shadow "alternative" biosphere? After all life existed for 3 billion years on this planet before even becoming multi-cellular. Plenty of time for chemical weirdos to develop a four base genetic code templating for D chirality beta amino acid chains with side chains made of silicon.Step off physicists, this field belongs to chemists.

Right. Microbiologists see lots of funny things under a microscope. Since the tools used to characterize little creatures make assumptions (DNA specific stains, PCR) who's to say that there is not something we might have missed? I want to do this. But up to now, no organism has been observed to deviate from the main stem (common chemical library) of life.

It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful. This could be because of the general environmental conditions of the time or because our form of DNA/RNA is simply more efficient/reproduces better. In any case, our form of life replicated like crazy and the other forms of life could have been driven back to niches until they died out. Fossils are notoriously tricky when it comes to single-cellular life forms, so perhaps we simply don't have the fossil record to know about this happening. Maybe on another planet, which formed life under different situations, the chemical structure of life is different from the one we are based on.

This is undoubtedly true and may be the reason there is something completely missing our understanding of primordial biology. I've always wondered why it took so long for macrocellular life to evolve. To me once you've got the something as bewilderingly complex as the ribosome, [wikipedia.org] connecting a glob of cells up to become a tree should be easy, but this isn't the case. 3 billion years to make a tree.Life appears early, but why not twice?

It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful.

The problem with this argument is that it only works if all the other forms of life were completely exterminated. We've found a lot of strange stuff in exotic places, but it all uses the same genetic code/etc as everything else. It seems unlikely to me that life began on earth more than once, unless you use a really weak version of began (like a piece of RNA formed but never did anything - I'd argue it was never alive to start). If life gets going well enough to start replicating and spreading, then I do

This "Star Trek Universe" (Transpermination/DNA everywhere/Vulcan hybrids) view doesn't really account for the fact that there is ample evidence of the entire ploddingly long evolutionary history here on earth. For example, there was a very long period of time (from 2.8 billion years ago till 300 million years ago) where the primitive cyanobacteria were the major photosynthetic organism. If life arrived from above it must have been really primitive. Think of it, evolutionary progress could have been expedit

Whenever I hear about a physicist who explains a problem from outside his area of expertise with a few simple equations, I think about this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/com... [smbc-comics.com]

* Why would this have anything to do with Darwin's theory of evolution? Evolutionary theory is pointedly silent on the origins of life, nor does it depend on a thermodynamic explanation of speciation.* Why would the article, or England for that matter, feel the need to explicitly state this?

[opinion] I feel like the scientific community has so rabid about avoiding anything resembling creationism that they have to re

* Why would the article, or England for that matter, feel the need to explicitly state this?

[opinion] I feel like the scientific community has so rabid about avoiding anything resembling creationism that they have to reassure themselves when new ideas come up, even if the ideas are no threat to their core beliefs. [/opinion]

For more context, from the article:

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

I think what you are calling "rabid" is merely a defensive reaction to the dialogue from the camp that can't accept the reality of Darwinian theory.

There are plenty of examples of Darwinian unbelievers;-) either misunderstanding or misrepresenting accepted or hypothesized scientific ideas in order to sway others. I recall a blurb (handed to me at the door of the house) that attempted to shoot down the scientific picture of "creation", and it quoted Stephen J. Gould direc

Mercury has no ocean or atmosphere to act as a heat bath, so there goes one counter-example. And while Venus has a thick atmosphere, it doesn't necessarily have the right chemicals for life to arise, so there goes your second counter-example.

Hydrogen, Venus used to have tons of it bonded to oxygen in an ocean, the ocean boiled under a runaway greenhouse, radiation then split the water vapour blasting the hydrogen off the planet. The oxygen then found some carbon to bind with which is why it's called a "runaway" greenhouse. The fate awaits the Earth in roughly half a billion years.

As TFA said "life is a special case", ie: Life needs certain ingredients in a specific environment to be the most efficient way to dissipate energy, but life is not the only example of spontaneous self-organising matter (crystals are an obvious example). This guy's idea attempts to explain ALL spontaneous self-organization of matter as a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When you get down to the molecular scale the line between alive and not-alive is poorly defined, my personal opinion is that "life" is an arbitrary distinction between different types of chemistry, a word invented by humans to more easily comprehend and talk about the world around us. Interestingly the distinction between alive and not-alive is a modern way of seeing the world, the oldest tribal religions (polytheism) believed everything had a spirit (was alive), including rocks, clouds, and celestial bodies.

For all we know about Venus, it could be a soup of unfamiliar life... taking this new perspective on life and sending a scientific lander to Venus to search might be a worthwhile annual expenditure of $0.25 per capita for the next 5 years.

The problem is how would you *detect* unfamiliar life? It's not like it gives off life-onium rays. You can detect particular chemicals you believe are produced by certain kinds of life, but that's a pretty narrow detection window. The best bet would probably be collecting samples and monitoring them for long periods under a powerful microscope looking for activity or complex organized structures, but even that would presume that the local life is active or organized in away we can see and understand. A simple crystalline life form for example might well appear like nothing more than a grain of sand on human timescales. Hell, aside from their propensity to arise spontaneously you could almost classify fire and crystals as life forms already - they "eat", they grow, they reproduce, fire even excretes, and crystals manage the organized self-replication with errors. If the errors were cumulative instead of structural they would be evolving already.

Well, your right; most of the population will settle for nothing less than little green men with anal probes, flying saucers and prescient, liberal advice for our species (Venusians would be all about the greenhouse effect).

I for one, would be fascinated to find Venus teaming with wacky crystal structures that display just the right amount of entropic dissipation to give physicists hardons.

Unless someone can prove how intelligent life arises inevitably (and given Earth's long history without anything most o

Besides the obvious technical hurdles, I think this (little green men to do charades with) is what people are really interested in.

They certainly don't want to hear that Venus has vast oceans full of self-replicating life forms that could, if they got into the Earth's mantle, trigger a massive increase in super-volcano activity. That's just a downer and not worth funding at all. That one Russian lander that melted after a few minutes was plenty to prove that any people walking around on Venus won't be abl

Hell yeah the Venusians would be all about the greenhouse effect, look at how cold and lifeless our world is! They've probably already infiltrated the government and fossil fuel industry as part of their terraforming project. Why waste all that energy on invasion and terraforming when you can just give the locals the internal combustion engine and let them terraform themselves out of existence? };-)

>given Earth's long history without anything most of us would find intelligentThere's another big unsubs

What waste? Fission waste = cesium, etc - stuff with half lives in the range of years to decades, within a few centuries most of it's safe, within a few millenia it pretty much all is. A species would have to be pretty stupid to leave that waste mixed in with a majority of perfectly good enriched fuel that would then need to be stored for millions of years before it decays to safe levels. It's not like reprocessing the "spent" fuel is particularly difficult, in many ways it's a lot easier than the initial

Hell, we know of at least one "natural" nuclear reactor in the great rift valley

I don't know why you've got quotes around the "natural".

The Oklo complex contains many distinct reactive centres. It's in Gabon, on the Atlantic coast, not in the Rift Valley which is on the other side of the continent. There are at least 15 activity centres in the Oklo mine and another one in a different mine some 35km SE from Oklo. A number of boreholes (for assessing more reserves) suggest activity at other centres, but sin

Are you sure there's not another formation in/upstream of the Great Rift? I first heard of the formation in the context of speculation that it may have contributed to elevated mutation rates during some of our ancestors evolutionary leaps, which would presume that it was irradiating the region they lived in, or at least the water supply.

"natural" because if the contextual presumption were true, then it would be an old nuclear waste dump, not a naturally occurring formation.

I don't think the bar is quite as high as "intelligent life" but anything short of multicellular life that can be seen withouta microscope is not going to bring much excitement to the average non-geek. An animal that moves and eats wouldbe the ultimate prize but even a plant that grows would be awesome. Personally for me I would love for someoneto discover life (even here on earth) that wasn't DNA/RNA based. Having a single evolutionary path greatly limitsour understanding of how life may have originated

I agree completely about the non-RNA life, life with a fundamentally different origin would do far more to expand our understanding of the potential. On the other hand something more similar to us might provide greater insights into our own biology - less philosophically interesting, but with greater potential for short-term benefits.

Hey, why settle for plants or animals? How about a predatory slime mold - a mobile amorphous colony organism displaying clear volition and some measure of intelligence? And

Are you comfortable using the biblical "Grow, multiply, populate" (that is, adapt to different conditions and stay, which rules out both crystals and fire BTW)

And exhibiting conscious-like attitude as a bonus.

As you point out, it must be done at scales different from ours and considering all kind of materials.

Finally, without detracting from the study, the tendency to obey the formula that describes heat dissipation is inherent IMHO to the fact that all combinations who do not dissipate enough heat will get

I prefer to keep religious language out of scientific discussion - it comes loaded with far too many personal preconceptions which cloud rational discourse. As appears to be the case here - I don't see any way to get "adapt" from "grow, multiply, populate" without at least a few major preconceptions.

Sure, apparently conscious activity makes things easier, but good luck finding that in bacteria. And even if we find it - if we create/encounter a digital artificial intelligence possessing true sentience and

Using biblical references triggers preconceptions, indeed, but not using it makes sure those won't ever be solved. Personally I have no problems imagining some ancient men with time on their hands building up their model of reality, be it with or without divine inspiration.

About adapting: the verb populate (fill up, whatever) applied to a set of different environments needs the subject to adapt, I don't see alternatives.

Good point about the self aware AI, it might be sentient without having undergone evolut

I could as easily see the argument *against* adapting: Go forth and fill all the niches I have made for you, but leave the others to their own occupants so that the balance may be preserved. Certainly such an interpretation would have saved us from a *whole* lot of problems we've created for ourselves.

I don't disagree about the game of life example, but since the context being discussed is life in *this* universe, I don't see that it's applicable. Obviously life in other universes, simulated or otherwise

Always nice to discover that somebody competent has already explored many implications of an idea.

I would disagree with your sig. Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that we are small rodent-like creatures living in the underbrush. Or that we are both an early multicellular colony organisms, or self-replicating clay crystals. We are their descendants, but we have undergone massive changes since we were them.

Mercury has no ocean or atmosphere to act as a heat bath, so there goes one counter-example. And while Venus has a thick atmosphere, it doesn't necessarily have the right chemicals for life to arise, so there goes your second counter-example.

From TFS:

'England['s]...formula...indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.'

And right below, you have this: "[..]from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."

In other words, Venus might see this phenomenon arise, but just not the particular specific case where life gets involved (ie. the wrong atoms are present or the wrong process is started or whatever else can affect the outcome).

Clearly the original poster intended to signify a to-be-defined set of “usable” chemicals. It is clear to everybody versed in even rudimentary chemistry that a concentration of noble gasses would not give rise to life for the simple reason that though concentrated they do not react. Thus the expected reactivity of the chemicals under consideration becomes a key concern. The building blocks of life as we know it (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, & cetera) is a pretty reactive bunch of stuff.

>It is clear to everybody versed in even rudimentary chemistry that a concentration of noble gasses would not give rise to life

That depends entirely on the environment - at sufficient temperatures and pressures the noble gasses become quite active. In fact they might be some of the few elements still non-volatile enough to build a stable chemistry around.

Yeah, chemistry is weird - it's built directly upon quantum mechanics after all. And we're only beginning to understand how extremely biased our understanding is towards "chemistry that can occur at STP".

I suppose that in the light of this I should return and revise “usable” to read “usable at the prevalent conditions within the given environment”. In that form the statement still stands and accommodates for your observation, too.

You must be those guys who label organic food with "contains no chemicals" and similar nonsense.

Don't be a jackass. OP said "Venus doesn't have the right chemicals," which completely ignores the premise of the paper - that, in the right conditions, individual atoms will come together in just-such-a-way to form the "right chemicals" for life.

Here's a hint: a "group of atoms" difinitively implies one or more chemicals.

No, it implies more than one atom. Kinda like how the phrase "set of tires" implies more than one tire, but not a whole car.

I think a more telling point is that any catalyst that dissipates energy more efficiently than "dumb chemistry" will be primed to explode across it's environment if it's capable of self-replication. And it's damnably hard to draw a line between self-replicating chemistry and life.

To use your car analogy, you don't need 1000hp to pull ahead in a drag race against someone with a 100hp car, 100.1hp will be enough in the long term.

Depends on the definition of "life" at that point. Mercury should have lots of crystallization effects which release energy during formation... But the excess heat would also remelt... And crystals do "grow"... And they can even reproduce (by fission when the crystal fractures...)

In the case of Venus - insufficient information for a meaningful answer...

I think this is specifically water based, or at least where things can be water like.With water you get a scum boundary. Thermically there will be pressure to move the heat through the scum boundary. Which will generally be less thermally conductive. This will promote chemical processes that move the heat through the boundary.

The scum boundary becomes cell membranes and the chemical processes then become cellular mechnisims that seek their own energy input (feed on available chemically stored energy).

And we've thoroughly explored those planets? I, personally, have no doubt we will eventually find some form of life on both planets. Obvious surface life seems to be unique to earth in our solar system... but even on earth, subsurface life far out numbers its terrestrial counterparts. Mercuries surface does not appear to be "Teeming with life" but that doesn't mean the subsurface isn't And Venus... well we can't see a damned thing there now can we? I don't see how that's a counter example to anything.

"We have Mercury and Venus as counter-examples. Why aren't they teeming with even more life."

Liquids only exist with the right pressure and temperature (CO2 never goes liquid but sublimates with our atmospheric pressure) --- and liquids will likely be discovered to be the "key". Asteroids, gas giants and --- say --- the moon don't have liquids.

Liquids are a special case of matter interactivity.

So I guess what the author is implying: liquids + energy tend to lead to more efficient molecules that dissip

You could say that life is only a more efficient given certain pressures and temperatures. By definition, conditions that are favorable for life are favorable because life is a more efficient way to increase entropy in those conditions.

Even if there's some truth behind the theory in the article, I'd still expect there to be a range of conditions under which life would be possible. Venus is probably out of it. While it seems unlikely that there's life on Venus now, it's still possible that there was life on Venus earlier in its history when (and if) the conditions were less extreme. (Although I can't imagine that anybody would be able to get any evidence for it, if it did exist.)

There might be life on/in Venus. Just not apparently the water/carbon based life that we're so egocentrically looking for.It's hard to imagine other forms of life and go expensively looking for them on a hunch that they may exist. That doesn't mean they don't.

Define life. Fire and crystals are extremely close by many definitions. Viruses are borderline, being clearly life by some and clearly non-life by others - they do not eat, excrete, respire, or even self-replicate by themselves, instead relying on subverting the self-replication capacity of other life to do so.

If you go by the increasingly popular definition of life as "capable of imperfect self-replication", which is necessary and sufficient for evolution to kick in, then crystals and fire are extremely

Do you know they don't? What prof. England does is to some extent to state the obvious: When you have a collection of elements (eg. atoms) that are able to combine to form larger elements (eg. molecules), and you bring about a situation where more 'atoms' can combine, then evolution is likely to happen - some molecules will be more stable than others, so we get 'survival of the fittest'. You could even do this with, say Lego blocks: put them in a large, rotating drum for a while, and they will probably clum

You left out self-replication. Survival of the fittest is an evolutionary concept and only applies to that big drum of Lego blocks if you get clumps of blocks capable of promoting the formation of similar clumps of blocks. At that point evolution can kick in, otherwise you just have a bunch of tumbling "rocks" that resist "weathering".

Possibly because the 'heat bath' description is somewhat simplistic. The earth has environments where organisms, or more simply clumps of molecules can lose energy locally. You have a dark surface that absorbs sunlight more effectively than the puddle of water you reside in and you lose energy to that puddle.

The environments of Mercury and Venus lack temperature differentials that would drive such a process.

The theory doesn't insist on life -- it simply further develops a principle that actually goes back IIRC to work by Prigogene on self-organization in open system (although I'm too lazy to look it up to be certain) and that is observed in phenomena like the transition from conduction to turbulent convection. The interesting thing is extending it to the microscale and chemistry.

Also, what's wrong with the "and" operator here, as well? Given a temperature range and physical environment conducive of complex

>The main topic here centers around the carbon based organisms we have become accustomed to.

I didn't see any such limitation implied, though carbon based life is used as a proof-of-concept example. I could easily envision a hot world where some sort of crystals melt and reform on a daily or seasonal basis - any inclusions that allow them to dissipate energy more efficiently and avoid melting would be step one, if they can promote the accumulation of such inclusions in new growth you've got step two, an

Exactly. Calling the amino acids produced by the Miller Urey experiment "precursors of life" is like calling a lump of silicon a "precursor to a Pentium".
It's true in a very literal sense, but really quite meaningless.

Personally, I think there must be some form of self-organization at work. The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it is based on selection of attributes that randomly arise over time. As a theory to explain the system-of-systems we see all around us, that is an awfully thin basis. One has to presume that merely by chance some beneficial attribute arises that just happens to be useful in surviving some random environmental chance. You start adding up all the chances of chances, and pretty soon life look

Because everybody is either democrat or republican, black or white, american or terrorist...

You forgot a few:

everyone believes in:"Science" and his prophet Darwin or "God" and his prophet [fill in religious leader],reason or emotion,starched or tie-died,rational or magical,whistle-blowers or politicians,capitalist or communists.Christian nation or Deist nation,Monotheist or Trinitarian,Libertarian or Rational,Successful or Failedtalent or no talent,monochrome or multichrome.

I'm glad to see someone else already made this comment. It's precisely this type of misappropriated use of the word "theory" in a scientific setting that leads so many people to ignorantly denounce legitimate scientific theories, confusing them for scientific guesswork.